Welcome Back to Gotham City

The Bat Light's busted.

Saturday, June 30, 2018

Gotham City Digest

Where America is Great Again, one forearm smash at a time!
As of right now, there are over 700 pro-immigrant protests all over the country. Among the grass roots, support for immigrants has perhaps never been higher and even the supine Democrats have gotten up off the floor and protested our Draconian policy of kidnapping children and sticking them in concentration camps. So, naturally, Trump had taken to saying Democrats want to abolish not only ICE but all law enforcement. What he's not telling you is that ICE is so loathed and reviled, even ICE doesn't want ICE to exist anymore.#somuchfuckingwinning! Even as Canada takes to the offensive and imposes tariffs on us, GM is preparing to axe tens of thousands of jobs as a result, saying the new Canadian tariffs will add several thousands of dollars per car.Another ambassador who found Trump impossible to work for.
Yeah, yeah, you're sick and injured but if you want Medicaid, you'll hafta work for it. Well, the headline reads, "Judge Blocks Kentucky’s Plan for Work Requirements on Medicaid." So fuck you, Trump. You have turned this nation into a Dickensian nightmare.
There you have it. Civility doesn't have any effect on these right wing psychopaths.

John
Oliver did a segment about this on his show a few months ago. He tried
to leaven it with humor but really, this is horrifying beyond words.
Toddlers younger than five are being paraded before immigration judges with
no parents, no advocates and no lawyer. Why even bother with the
pretense of the law being upheld? We're trying toddlers like adults only
they're not given even free legal counsel.Remember the time Scott Walker was punked by a reporter from THE DAILY BEAST who posed as Charles Koch? This was even better.They're not even trying to hide the collusion, anymore.This is starting
to look like the last chapter of ANIMAL FARM in which the pigs began
morphing into humans and the humans morphed into pigs. Here, you have
Republicans sounding like Russians and Russians sounding like
Republicans. Cue ending credits and music, fade to black amidst a series
of laughs and pig grunts.
Money trail of $10 million and Mueller's on the scent?! Mo, Larry! Cheese! Woo woo woo woo woo!
After the melees that erupted nine years ago during the health care town
halls, in which a Congressman's brother got his gas line cut, I don't
want to hear any shit from right wingers about treating Trump staffers
civilly in their private lives. And finally...

Friday, June 29, 2018

Gotham City Digest

Where all the super villains are "very fine people."
Not only is Trump trying to break up the NATO alliance, which could only
help his boss Putin, but he's also trying to break up the entire
European Union, which would also benefit Putin, and offering favorable trade deals as bribes. What a deal maker.
The day before yesterday, Milo called for armed vigilantes to shoot and
kill journalists. Then, hours before the shooting at Annapolis
yesterday, Rubio made the mistake of insulting the media. David Simon
had had enough and lashed out at him.
With chilling irony, less than three years ago, novelist and journalist Carl Hiaasen wrote about mass shootings for the Miami Herald. The last line
reads, "And all we do is wait for the next one." His brother Robert was one of the five people killed at the Capital Examiner yesterday.
Thanks to the Iowa State Supreme Court, women's rights advocates won this battle. Now it's on to refight the right wing war on Roe vs Wade.The REAL reason why a hale and healthy Anthony Kennedy quit- His son Justin at Douche Bank was Trump's biggest moneylender, eventually giving Trump over $1,000,000,000 in loans when other banks didn't want to. Why didn't this get more traction?
And of course Dana Loesche denied saying we should "curb stomp" reporters, even though Shaun King showed people the video. How many more journalists have to be murdered for doing their jobs before we realize there is not one degree of separation between eliminationist, right wing rhetoric against the media and journalists getting murdered?
Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal was also arrested for "unlawful demonstration." When peaceful assembly is deemed a crime when
technically it's granted to all Americans in the First Amendment, you
know this country's turned a dark corner. What used to be rights have
been plea-bargained down to privileges that have to be earned by buying
permits. Meanwhile, NeoNazis and white supremacists who do buy those
permits get to do whatever they want on our streets with the
"president's" blessing and enjoy the protection of law enforcement.
People, this is not America. This is a palimpsest BADLY superimposed
over our original Democratic Republic and ineptly trying to masquerade
as a functioning democracy like a wolf wearing a fleece.
Nonetheless, they will persist and will be back in full force tomorrow. And finally...

There's no link to this because so far it's made the rounds exclusively on social media. Yesterday in Simi Valley, California, there was a peaceful pro-immigrant rally. Then this Trumepette in a MAGA hat showed up and began haranguing a 14 year-old boy with taunts such as, "You are going to be the first deported." and "dirty Mexican". And I'm sure she was perfectly civil during every spittle-flecked word that was launched from her mouth. She looks like she's choking on her own bile.
I hope she was.

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Gotham City Digest

God only knows why this isn't Milo Yiannopoulos' mug shot by now. Yesterday, when texting a reporter (You know, the kind of writer Milo pretended to be at Breitbart), Milo said, "“I can’t wait for the vigilante squads to start gunning journalists down on sight.” When asked for clarification (Like, "Are you fucking serious?!"), Milo texted back that was his standard response. That was bad enough.
24 hours later, a gunman broke into the office of the Capital Gazette, a venerable institution that has been around since 1727, and killed five people and injuring many others. We don't know who the gunman is, what his motivations are or anything. But one fact is clear- Yiannopoulos yesterday (and not for the first time) called for journalists to be murdered by vigilantes, something even Trump hasn't (yet) called for and today a gunman killed five employees at a newspaper. Their blood is on his hands. Period.
And, in keeping with the right wing mindset, Milo wasted no time poo-poohing the idea that he was in any way, shape or form responsible for five people getting killed.

Again, Simon & Schuster, well played by offering that psychopath a contract. "Dangerous faggot", indeed.

And, oh, no, let's not dare blame Trump cheerleader Milo Yiannopoulos, the
white English right wing nut job who yesterday called for journalists to
be killed by gunmen, not when we still have some black people to blame, as Sean Handjob couldn't wait to do on his radio show. It was so scummy, even fellow right wing nut bag Joe Walsh called him out on Twitter.
We've been calling for a Blue Wave this November but, as usual, the Tammany Hall 2.0 Machine Democrats are building a seawall to prevent that horrible event from happening. Witness the usual suspects, Pelosi and Chuck Schumer (D-Wall Street). While Donnie Dumbo was screaming his usual bullshit and verbally battering everyone under the sun, while Milo was calling for journalists to be gunned down by vigilantes, the Democratic "leaders" were calling for civility in the wake of Sarah Sanders getting her fat ass kicked out of the Red Hen.
And less than two days after they tried to put oil on the waters preceding that Blue Wave, a gunman killed five people at a Maryland newspaper. Fuck you, Chuck and Nancy. The rules of civility no longer apply in a fascist regime such as ours.
In case you need any further proof that we're living in a nation that
reads like a dystopian sci fi novel, check out this headline from
Homeland Security's own website. "Secure the border and build the wall"?
Is that Nazi bunker boilerplate enough for you? It's been up for over
four months.
As always with tRump, the reality was actually much worse than what was reported. This was something else that happened at the shit show of the G7 summit. Trump is actually seriously entertaining the idea of dropping out of NATO. Gee, I wonder what his boss Putin would think about that. Oh, wait...
People of the cloth are now getting arrested at protests over the government kidnapping immigrant children and putting them in concentration camps. This is how much Trump thinks of faith. They're good as long as they sign on to his fascist agenda.
Recently, Jeff Sessions, the KKK's pet leprechaun, thought that kids getting ripped from their mothers' arms was so humorous, he made a joke out of it at a right wing shindig. He reportedly got lots of laughs from those who are demanding civility from liberals.Trump plans to meet Putin in Helsinki on July 16th for his employee performance review.
Oh, remember that little nonbinding agreement that Donnie Dumbo signed with the second most insane psychopath world leader, something about North Korea's nuclear disarmament? Yeah, uh... Forget it.

Chickenshit Sean Hannity lookalike civilly flings himself at Red Hen Restaurant.
Pretty soon, if Trudeau extends his offer to Americans seeking refuge from our national dumpster fire, there will be nothing left but Trump deadenders panhandling on K Street and Starbucks baristas. If you decide to go to the Great White North, here's a handy guide of what you'll need to know.
(Courtesy of Mock Paper Scissors) Sarah Sanders is getting a Secret Service detail of her own. Yes, you read that right. Sarah "Elvira Gantry" Sanders is getting a
Secret Service detail because the poor snowflake couldn't handle being
treated like a gay couple at a right wing bakery. So my friend Tengrain
is wondering what you think her Secret Service codename should be. My contribution: Alternative Fats.
In case you're running out of reasons to hate Jeff fucking Bezos... Oh, in case you missed this, speaking of Foxconn, this came out today. Trump couldn't wait to get to Wisconsin to join his cross-eyed bro Scott Walker to break ground on a new plant they're building. The good news is they're planning on creating up to 13,000 jobs. The bad news? Foxconn wanted no part of Wisconsin until they got a fat $4,000,000,000 break on their taxes.
That comes out to $307,692.30 per job. Which I'm sure minimum wage-earning laborers in a right to work state like Wisconsin will make up in NO time! America! What a country! And finally...
Only a Republican who failed to file taxes for 15 consecutive years would be surprised when he's finally arrested for tax evasion.

Columbus May Have Discovered America...

...but Cortez rediscovered it.
Last Tuesday evening on Primary Night, races were being run in Maryland, South Carolina and other states. But, as with the Olympics, every election cycle, every Primary Night, has to have its darling, its Big Story. In this case, it was a race in New York's 14th Congressional district when a 28 year-old bartender beat Rep. Joe Crowley.
Who's Joe Crowley and why is Ocasio-Cortez defeating him so important? Let me count the ways:
Joe Crowley, the head of the Queens County Democrats, is one of those powerful Congressmen who fly under the radar and are little known outside their districts. While loudmouths and firebrands suck all the oxygen out of a room, Crowley was not one of them. A quiet, middling progressive, a Blue Dog in the mold of Bill and Hillary Clinton, Crowley represented the 14th district in my native Queens and the Bronx with all the excitement of a Steny Hoyer, which is to say none.
The Beltway cocktail circuit started whispering he'd be the next House Minority Leader, which ought to show you how out of touch is the Beltway elite that can suck down martinis while not being able to read the tea leaves that the Democrats stand a very real chance of taking back at least the House if not both chambers.
Crowley is a 10 term congressman who had run unopposed by his own party for the last seven of those terms. That's 14 years.
Depending on which news outlet you listen to, Crowley outspent and outraised Ocasio-Cortez by a margin of between 10 and 16 to one. His upstart challenger did not accept one penny from corporations or Super PACS. In other words, Ocasio-Cortez ably showed you can win a primary campaign against a 10 term incumbent in a safe blue district while keeping big money out of politics.
At 28, just three years above the minimum age to run for a congressional seat, Ocasio-Cortez is literally half the age of the 56 year-old Crowley.
This was no mere eking out a fluke victory such as antisemitic Neo Nazi Arthur Jones winning the GOP primary in Chicago. Ocasio-Cortez defeated Crowley by a sound 15%, 57.5% to his 42.5%. And she did it by, again, without corporate cash, without Super PAC money and without the support of the Democratic establishment. And knowing the Tammany Hall 2.0 wing of the Democratic Party as well as I do, I wouldn't expect them to allocate many if any resources to the rest of Ocasio-Cortez's campaign.
No doubt, their excuse will be that she'll have a cakewalk between now and November against Republican Anthony Pappas, especially if Elizabeth Perri, the Conservative Party candidate, stays in to split whatever meager votes Pappas will get in the 14th's minority-majority district. I wouldn't expect much from Crowley, either, except the bland and meaningless pledge of support that he's already made.
Oh, and she's also a Democratic Socialist. You know, the kind of Democrats we used to have until the 80's. You know, the decade of the "Reagan Democrats."
Now that the boring but telling numbers and other ephemera are out of the way, let's talk about why Ocasio-Cortez won the night before last.
Joe Crowley is the darling of neoliberals who have actually heard of him. But like a lot of Blue Dogs, Crowley got complacent. He took his constituency for granted. He did this just before the primary election by citing the old right wing excuse of a "scheduling conflict" to skip out on a debate with Ocasio-Cortez, cynically sending in his stead a Latina proxy who, as Ocasio-Cortez later noted, looked like her.
Crowley threw a few token jabs at the power-drunk ICE, calling them "fascistic" at one point but, unlike Ocasio-Cortez, stopped well short of calling for its abolition.

After Tuesday night, Ocasio-Cortez had everyone running and screaming for the hills. The NRA went after her in an unhinged rant of the ages. Sean Hannity went after her in a hilarious segment in which he posted her entire campaign platform and tried to make it sound as if women's rights, caring for the elderly, clean campaign finance and higher education and Medicare for all were bad things. Holy fucking Milton Friedman, Batman, we can't have that! Cue the Nelson Riddle music! To the Batshitmobile!
And here are the two main reasons why Crowley lost, besides Cortez' massive appeal to the voters of the 14th CD:
Number one, Crowley got complacent and thought he'd have a job for life. Don't think for a minute he wasn't listening to that Beltway cocktail circuit scuttlebutt about him giving Pelosi the old heave-ho. He was unopposed for seven straight election cycles, thought he'd never have to actually campaign ever again and he lost touch with his constituents' needs.
Number two, and I'm speaking as a native New Yorker here, Crowley also forgot that New York City (and this goes especially for the minority-rich Queens and the Bronx), is a city of neighborhoods. Chicago also is a city of neighborhoods but not as much as the Big Apple. In the summer, block parties abound. In Scott Carson's old neighborhood, 69th Street, there's a Halloween bash where everyone on the block goes all out with their frightful decorations. Crowley was so blinded by his national career ambitions, he seemed to have completely forgotten about the people who kept putting him back on the Hill because they simply had no better option.
Then came Ocasio-Cortez, a Bernie Sis.
And not only did she show love to her neighbors, she even recently traveled up to Harlem as an activist and harangued the ICE officials over detaining immigrant children. Joe Crowley wasn't there beside her. In fact, he was so out of touch he couldn't even be bothered to show up for his own debate.
Crowley is what happens when you constantly campaign on letting tired old machine Democrats oppose a tyrant who never should have won an election to begin with. Crowley didn't seem to listen to the pundits to the left of him when they warned that the Democratic Party cannot simply win on the dubious merits of being against Trump and not having the slightest clue with what you'd replace his fascist agenda.
Ocasio-Cortez gave the 14th district more than a glimmer of what that national platform should look like. And if Democrats were smart (and they aren't always), they'd listen to her.
When the results came in and the media had declared her the winner, she took the celebration to the bar at which she works and thanked everyone in her campaign and invited them all to join her in DC.
Now that's a block party!

Wednesday, June 27, 2018

Welcome Back to the Sweat Shop

Excerpt: "For the worker, this means they can leave the union and save on fees yet still get the pay and benefits the union negotiates with the employer."

Now, you show me any other private organization or business that voluntarily provides benefits and comparable union pay to employees who don't pay dues.

That deadbeat would be wearing that boot print on his keister for the rest of his life, amiright?

Companies were forced to pay a living wage to their labor pool BECAUSE of unions. And if it weren't for unions, we'd still be getting paid under what the minimum wage is now and working long hours in dangerous, dirty working conditions without any hope for paid time off, workman's comp, paid vacations, etc. That's because your average industrialist is a cold-blooded psychopath who has to be politically and legally leveraged into doing the right thing. That's what your onerous mandatory union dues got you and your ancestors. And, as long as the union was providing an actual service to its constituents, we didn't have a gripe with mandatory dues.

No unions is what got us the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire in which nearly 150 people were killed.

You want a glimpse into what it was like working without unions? Look no further than Hunan, China's notorious and infamous Foxconn sweatshop, the Triangle Shirtwaist of the 21st century that trowels out bullshit for Amazon's Jeff fucking Bezos and Apple's Tim Cook.

Aren't Republicans the ones who always yell, "There's no such thing as a free lunch" when the issue of universal healthcare or free college tuition arises? In fact, Republicans are some of the biggest fucking moochers on the planet. And aren't right wingers the ones always screaming about "activist judges"? Right wing judges are also some of most activist ones on the planet. And their rancid politics are openly coloring what should be impartial judgment in matters of Constitutional interpretation.

No Country For an Old Man

This is ultranationalist Nazi douchebaggey at its lowest. Kidnapped
kids who will never enjoy the benefits of being American are forced to recite a pledge of allegiance to a country that destroyed their families
and hates them.
I remember reading years ago that when the
Russians liberated Auschwitz, they withheld food from the starved
survivors until they took a pledge to be loyal Communist Soviet
subjects. The Holocaust survivors essentially were liberated from a
dictator by a dictator who still treated them like 2nd class humans and withheld a basic necessity such as food.

I see no difference in what we're during here. Whether we're talking
Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia or Trump's Neo Nazi dystopian America, it's
all cut from the same rotten piece of wholecloth. All dictatorships are
militantly nationalistic. We're not a country of laws but a country of a
man who happens to be completely out of his gourd and who,
terrifyingly, still has countless thousands of people in the government
just as cruel as him or more who will blindy do his every bidding and
more.
I used to cheer on Mueller and his probe but now it's in
its second year and we're no longer apppeased by the rare appetizer.
We're losing patience. I know I am. And the big piece we should have
long ago checkmated is still careering across the board creating wanton
destruction and weakening our nation in every conceivable way even as he
tells his mouth-breather supporters he's making it great again.
And the
big hole card that never fails with these idiots is Nationalism,
National Security, because crying little brown kids have become
synonymous with the Bogey man MS-13.
And not a single gang member occupies a single one of those child prisons.
Pledge allegiance to what's left of your soul and pray not to God but that there's something left to salvage in the morning.

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Gotham City Digest

Where all the news is fit to print and uniforms fit the fat.
Remember back when he was running for Senate, Rand Paul said he would've liked to repeal the Civil Rights Act because it impinged on the rights of business owners? Well, after Sarah Sanders got her fat Kentucky Fried Chicken-eating ass tossed out of the Red Hen, she decided to use her Press Secretary's standing to punch down and whine about her ejection. Then today, Chancellor Trump tweeted much the same thing from the bunker and called the Red Hen "filthy". That's right. The so-called President of the United States is using his bully pulpit to insult and discourage business from a restaurant that is, in the owner's own words, "the size of most peoples' apartments." Of course, Donnie Dumbo in his ongoing progressive dementia forgot about that little kerfuffle that happened less than six years ago when the DJT Steak House in Vegas was closed down because of 51 health violations. Oh yeah and Mar-a-Lago's own 78 health code violations over the last three years.
Well, "the greatest jobs president God's ever seen" just cost 60 people in Missouri their jobs in the biggest nail producing company in America. This, of course, is due to Trump's insane trade war on virtually the entire planet earth. But wait, it gets worse. The company itself may be out of business, ironically, by Labor Day. Way to go, Double Weave. #somuchwinning Another bigoted Trump dittohead heard from. God I hate these racists that Trump's bringing out of the woodwork. Not only is this old biddy channeling Donald Trump, she's still regurgitating his old talking points from June 2015, namely that Mexicans are "rapists, criminals and animals." Try to keep up, grannie. There are lots of fresh alternative facts and right wing talking points to catch up on.
You may want to sit down for this one, because it'll come as a shock. You ready? Headline: "Private prison company moves annual conference to Trump-owned golf resort." I know it's a terrible shock. Let me know if you want me to call a paramedic. The company in question is Geo, one of the two biggest for-profit prison corporations on the planet. Coincidentally, they've also contracted with Trump's government to build more detention centers to the tune of tens of millions of your taxpayer dollars. That would be child detention centers, in case you were wondering.
Donald Trump has said a lot of frightening things since he started pretending to be the president. But get a load of this. This bullshit about doing away with due process is
coming from the same piece of shit who lets Russian anchor babies be
born on Trump-owned properties.
This douchebag is completely unmoored from reality at this point. #1, he
didn't "gut" ObamaCare BECAUSE of McCain. And #2, even if he had, why
would he brag about stealing health care from tens of millions of
people? But to take pot shots at a sick, dying old man... Seriously, folks, I never thought I'd live to see the level of discourse get this low.
While Russian oligarch wives are giving birth in luxury in Miami with the blessings of Comrade Trump, this is going on near the northern border: Border Patrol agents are stopping people in Maine and New Hampshire and demanding to see their papers and asking about their citizenship status before they board buses. What does that remind you of?

Yeah, that's it.
Maybe it's time to suspend Godwin's Law. And finally...
Now you know why they called the cops on a US Senator and turned away a
Congresswoman on Father's Day and several big city mayors. This is what the fascists in our
government are hiding.

Monday, June 25, 2018

Three More Shades of Grey

All things considered, I guess I should be grateful I wasn't hit by a semi.
This happened last night right around the corner from our house at 6:07 last night. Don't let the pictures fool you. It was actually a lot darker at this time of night and thereby hangs a tale.
I was about to make a left hand turn at a three way intersection, a turn I've successfully made literally thousands of times in the nine plus years I've been living in this neighborhood. After carefully looking both ways on a very rainy night, I finally judged it safe to turn and a second later, I saw a dark grey SUV loom about five feet from my car.
As you can tell from the damage, I got T-boned and luckily suffered nothing more than bruised ribs and a headache that won't seem to go away (I didn't go to the hospital since I hate the place and I was just there. More on that later). The reason I didn't see the woman who hit me was because she was driving with her headlights off. Since it was raining heavily and my driver window marred with rainwater (I didn't open it because I didn't want to get soaked), I got hit by a dark grey SUV with the headlights off on a dark, grey road on a dark grey rainy night. If this woman was trying to blend into her environment, she couldn't've possibly done a better job.
All the same, the cops judged me to be the one at faulr because, since she was on a straightaway, I impeded her right of way. They seem to be blithely ignorant of the fact that if she'd obeyed another state law that mandates using headlights both after sunset and during a rainstorm, I would have seen her from a distance and not impeded her progress.
Since the local towing company has a racket going on with the police, they towed my car back to their junkyard on the other side of town miles away so that, after towing and "storage" charges (AAA suddenly doesn't want to get involved when you're REALLY in desperate need), I had to today pay them $150 in ransom to get my car back in my driveway. (AAA said they'd reimburse me but I'll believe it when I see it). I found out the cops are trying to stick me with this when I filed a claim with my insurance company.
Bottom line, old Betsy's totaled, we have no car and I was about to
make a cardiologist appointment at the local hospital to have Mrs. JP's
congestive heart failure checked and treated. RIP Betsy 1998-2018.
I privately made a call to several friends for help and, while I acknowledge that no one owes us diddly, the response wasn't quite as large as we'd hoped. I need at least $1000 for another used car so I can get covered under the Lemon Law. Seriously, we are in the direst need perhaps in the nine years we've been living here. We still need to do food shopping, laundry (we're the only ones in the building who don't have a washer-drier hookup) and, most importantly, my fiancee has a serious heart condition that we need to get treated immediately (I had her in the hospital's ER getting checked out about four days ago).
Obviously, anything you kind folks can do will be more appreciated than ever because right now, if I had to spend $1000 on a car tomorrow, I'd wind up having to use our rent money for next month.
Tomorrow, hopefully, I'll resume our lunacy at the southern border and everywhere else as programmed.

Friday, June 22, 2018

Gotham City Digest

Where we don't tolerate guttersnipes.
Trump's addled-pated ambivalence and incoherence is why we don't have an immigration bill. Even though both crafted by Republicans predictably,
without Democratic input, suck. Yes, the party that screams bloody murder when they think they're being left out is, once again, locking out Democrats. As a result, we have two bills: One ultra Draconian piece of shit with gas ovens and the other not quite so Draconian piece of shit that leaves them out. And yet, despite nearly a year and a half of this sick, silly bullshit from the White House, it honestly never seems to have occurred to a single Republican that Donald Trump just may be completely out of his fucking mind.
Yes, this Eastern Eurotrash airhead who wore a jacket embossed with, "I don't care" to a child detention facility said "Good luck" to those poor kids.
That's what you say when you do the Pontius Pilate thing with people
with whom you no longer want to be involved. I'm surprised she didn't
throw paper towels at them. Those kids don't need luck- They need a brand new administration in the ultimate Blue Wave.
First, there was this Aryan Ann Coulter wannabe in an Oregon DMV that says all immigrants at the border ought to be shot on sight. Now, another right wing nut job in Oregon is calling for immigrants to be executed. These vocational suicide bombers just can't keep their foul mouths shut. Which is probably a good thing.
Just minutes after Il Douche took to (of course) Twitter to decry the stories of family grief over being separated from their children as "phony stories", CNN set the record straight by showing a video of a Guatemalan mother being reunited with her son a month after they were separated. Way to go, girl.
Wow, private prison stocks are up 100% since Putin got Trump elected. Yeah, America will certainly be great again after half the country is locked up behind bars.
I've had it up to here with these evangelical douchebags. They're nuttier than squirrel turds. It's either God's will or fake news. Which is it, assholes? You can't have it both ways.

After what happened in Charlottesville ten months ago, has the National Park Service lost its fucking mind? They're letting Neo
Nazis and white nationalists hold a rally in a district that's 49% black? How can this possibly have an outcome that doesn't involves lots of ambulances and meat wagons? Pier One, you better start stocking up.
I just knew a story like this would pop up any day now. And Trump told us three years ago that it's the immigrants we have to worry about, that they're the
rapists. Seems the ones we have to worry about are the child detention officers.
In one of the most hilarious news stories ever, the Director of ICE actually just said that they can't be compared to Nazis because (wait for it) they're just following orders! Did this douchebag not watch Judgment at Nuremberg? What's next? Is ICE going to change its motto to "Arbeit Macht Frei"?
You're kidding me, right? The fucking Mouse won't let the Goddamn show die,
will it? Roseanne Barr was the reason it was successful and she was the
reason why the brand was destroyed. It'll be interesting where they try to explain what happened to her character. I'm
guessing in the first episode, Trump makes her the new Press Secretary after Sarah leaves.
Then the ratings will take a nosedive after that.Well, that could've gone better. Apparently, Trump's strategy of Making America Great Again is fracturing the western alliance to the benefit of his buddy Putin and what better way to do that than to throw Starburst candies at Angela Merkel? I swear, between Bush molesting her at the G8, Obama spying on Germany and now Trump's constant assclownery, poor Angela must think we're a nation of wall to wall lunatics and fascists.
Psychopath leprechaun Jeff Sessions says immigrant kids kidnapped from their parents have it better than many American kids. Such as Jeff Sessions' kids, for instance. And finally...
The people who can't spell "immigration"...

...will now explain how racism doesn't exist.

Good day and may God help us one and all, unless He, too, went packing for Canada.

Thursday, June 21, 2018

I Really Do Care. Do You?

“It's been going on for many, many decades and many years. Whether it was President Bush, President Obama, President
Clinton — same policies. They can't get them changed because both sides
are always fighting. ...This is maybe a great chance to have a change.” - Donald Trump

Since photography was invented in the 1820's, every disaster or outrage has an iconic photo. In cases such as the Civil War, there were several iconic photos, all seemingly given to us by Mathew Brady. There were several others that came out of Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan after we'd illegally invaded and occupied those nations. Occupy Wall Street gave us more in 2011, as did the Ferguson protests. In this highly visually oriented day and age, we crave iconic images that become lead images in news articles, blog posts and internet memes that are shared millions of times on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere on social media. It's an effective way for humans to focus their anger, outrage, sorrow or grief by fixating on that one iconic image that seems to sum up an event or global catastrophe that never should have happened.

Donald Trump's and Jeff Sessions' "Zero Tolerance" policy that was announced just early last month has, in seven short weeks, given us several iconic images on which we can all focus our outrage (Or, if you're a Trump deplorable, your uber nationalist pride). Time Magazine today had revealed their re-purposing of an iconic image, that of a Honduran toddler girl crying at a Texas Border Patrol station and, with ingenious political retribution, giving that tragic photo a secondary iconic life.

But when she made a "surprise" photo op at a detention facility (nonprofit and housing just 60 children, with cute pictures on the walls as if it was a grammar school classroom in Grosse Pointe, Michigan) in McAllen, Texas, Melania Trump had inadvertently given us another iconic photo that perfectly sums up the right wing's collective reaction to the horror show taking place at the southern border: In her tone-deafness, the First Lady, wife of the "President" who put this Fourth Reich shit show into warp speed 10, thought it would be a good idea to wear a designer jacket with, "I really don't care. Do you?" embossed on the back.

It was so unbelievable, so audacious, people on social media were asking, "Is this for real or is it Photoshopped?" It was not and the First Lady's press flaks have already gone into full-blown spin mode, blaming, as usual, the media for noticing her wearing a jacket reading, "I really don't care. Do you?" before meeting immigrant children who, despite their relatively cushy circumstances, were nonetheless ripped from parents' arms by her husband, a man who is supremely indifferent to their families' pain. No, quite the contrary- I'm sure seeing a foreign-born, wealthy white woman wearing a jacket with such a saying sent the perfect message to those children who could read English.

At least as equally telling as Melania's "Fuck you" jacket was the safe choice of a photo op venue. Instead of McAllen, the Potemkin Village of child prisons, they could have taken Melania to Tornillo, Texas (high 106° today), an Arpaio-class tent city that's about to rapidly expand despite Trump signing that head fake of a 20 day moratorium on separating kids from their families.

Notably, they also chose not to take Melania to Shiloh, also in Texas, another for-profit concentration camp in which immigrant children are forcibly drugged, beaten, choked, and, in at least three cases that we know of, murdered. Shiloh, despite getting into hot water with the authorities in the past, has received upwards of a billion and a half dollars in contracts since Trump took office. They're lying to the migrant children and telling them if they don't take the "vitamins" they're offering, they'll never see their parents again. Likewise, they also didn't take the First Lady and her now-infamous "Fuck You" jacket to Shenandoah Valley Juvenile (Detention) Center where it would've really fit in. At Shenadoah Valley, immigrant children are regularly handcuffed and beaten, according to court records.

When Melania Trump goes to that tent city in Tornillo, TX or Shiloh or Shenandoah that's housing thousands of child prisoners and speaks out
against her husband and the abuse he's inviting from the fascists who run them instead of blaming Democrats for this, then I'll be
impressed. Until then, fuck your photo ops.

Norwegian Wood

"I once had a girl Or should I say she once had me

She showed me her room"

This is a cartoon that, as the caption says, originated in Norway. It perfectly captures several things, starting with Trump's dictatorial posture and arm patch that says, "Border Control." But it also carefully makes a distinction between Trump and the United States, blaming not the American people for this Central American pogrom we're seeing but Trump.

To be fair, this attitude toward immigrants at the border did not start with Trump. Sorry, limousine liberals, but Obama also separated children from their parents and threw them in jail. Trump just took it to the next level. With their typical craven hypocrisy, the aforementioned limousine liberals who thought Obama was the next Lincoln and then Hillary Clinton the next Margaret Thatcher, hardly said a word when we had very much the same humanitarian crisis at our southern border during the last administration but are selectively screaming themselves hoarse now.

In this other iconic photo put up by those limousine liberals, one that had also gotten a second life, people have been putting this up on social media to show the world how cruel Trump can be. But in fact, it's a file photo taken almost exactly four years ago in Nogales, Arizona. That would be 2014, during the Obama administration. These elitist limousine liberals were also eerily quiet when Obama had quickly deported two and a half million immigrants in the first couple of years of his first term. Perhaps not coincidentally, so were right wing voters.

But Obama's not the president, any more (Neither is Trump, but that's another story). Just as Obama had inherited a police state from Bush consisting of a Department of Homeland Security, two wars and a DNI, so Trump had inherited (thanks largely to Clinton voters and tens of millions of other racists and evolutionary dropouts), in al Jazeera's words, "a well-oiled deportation infrastructure from the Obama administration,
which has deported 2.5 million people - more than every single US
president of the 20th century combined."

But, as we say, is "better late than never"? Try telling that to the countless families Obama ripped apart over a decade ago. Yes, it's good that Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives alike are condemning this "Zero Tolerance" policy of Trump's and Sessions'. In fact, Melania Trump's own immigration attorney, Michael Wildes, risked his job today by coming out swinging against it even as his employer, Melania Trump, was touring her child's Potemkin Village in McAllen, Texas.

Republicans, keeping a cynical eye on the midterms and trying to gauge which blowback will be worse come Election Day, are trying to craft a bill that will make everyone happy. But George W. Bush can tell you all about that. Not realizing how deeply divisive an issue it was, 11 years ago Bush tried to craft his own bill (the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act) that sought to make Congress happy and it blew up in his face like a prank cigar. Republicans derided it because it wasn't Draconian enough and Democrats blasted it because it was too Draconian.

But, for all his failings, W was never what one could reasonably call an immigration hawk. Trump is, in spades. And while Bush's own party stood tall against his one, sole attempt to reach across the aisle, we're not seeing this so much with today's Republican Party. Trump can only push them so far and, if faced with certain defeat in the midterms, they will either adopt some cautious populism that's critical of his immigration policies or, like so many others, they'll just decide to throw in the towel.

And maybe for once, Trump was inadvertently right when he said, "This is maybe a great chance to have a change." I just wouldn't bet on it (especially as Trump just asked the DoD to make room for 20,000 more immigrant prisoners) because the toads in the GOP are too stupid to realize the water's already at a high boil and it will cost them in the midterms.

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

A Quick Study in Contrasts

I'm not going to have much time for blogging since I have to take Mrs. JP to the hospital for a checkup and I probably won't be able to even use my cell phone in the building. But I just wanted to give you a study in contrast brought about by King Hairod and his fascist policy at the border.
At last count, 2342 children have been ripped from their parents' arms in the six weeks since Zero Tolerance took effect.
First, watch what happened to Rachel Maddow last night when she tried to read an AP bulletin on her show about the "tender age" shelters we're putting up. She came perilously close to breaking down live on national TV and had to hand off the story to Lawrence O'Donnell.

Secondly, also last night, Trump's former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, made an appearance on Fox (of course) and when Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas informed us that a 10 year-old with Down Syndrome was abducted from her mother, Lewandowski idiotically chimed in with "Womp womp."

I don't know what Lewandowski thought he was accomplishing aside from channeling Trump when he mocked a disabled reporter on the campaign trail but please keep in mind two things:
Firstly, the news is now so incredibly horrible that our nation's anchors can't read it without crying. This is a new low and you have go back to November 22, 1963 when Walter Cronkite broke down on CBS reporting on President Kennedy's assassination.
Secondly, within the space of a couple of hours, we were presented with a study in contrast between Maddow, the choked voice of compassion, and Lewandowsk, the sneering voice of fascism. What was too horrible for Maddow to report is fun fodder for Lewandowski. What is horrible for progressives is funny to Nazis like Lewandowski. Megyn Kelly, of all people, denounced Lewandowsk.
This humanitarian circus that is orchestrated by Trump is already costing Republicans in two different ways. First, they're receiving backlash from their constituents at home and the Senate is trying to draft a bill to put an immediate end to Zero Tolerance. Obviously, they're just doing this because they're keeping one jaundiced, cynical eye on the midterms (which is why Ted Cruz from Texas, who's up for reelection this year, is involved in it). But whatever it takes to put this abomination to an end.
It's also costing the Republican Party Republicans. Today, GOP strategist Steve Schmidt announced on Twitter that he's quitting the Republican Party effective immediately (I guess being played by Woody Harrelson will do that).
And Trump's losing the support of Republican governors. First it was just a few states. Then it was five. By this morning, 11 states, some with Republican Governors (including my state of Massachusetts, one of the first three to lead the charge), announced they were pulling their National Guard troops from the southern border in protest of us kidnapping children.
I'd say that's consensus. Now all that remains to be seen is how long it takes for the UN's Human Rights Council from which we'd just separated ourselves begins to investigate and act on the humanitarian crisis at our southern border.

Tuesday, June 19, 2018

Gotham City Digest

Where King Herod changed his name to Trump.

The latest from Fox & Frauds. Right wing semantics at its finest. Next thing you know, they'll be calling them "freedom cages."

Remember about 13 years ago when Duncan Hunter went on national TV and told the American public about all the delicious food we were serving Muslim prisoners we were holding ar Gitmo without charge? Yes, Laura Ingraham went there and called child detention facilities "summer camps" and "boarding schools." Sounds as if Laura Riefenstahl is begging us to cost her some more sponsors. David Hogg, you got this?
In the meantime, here's a little education for dear Laura of the Fourth Reich:

Meet Kim and Carl. Kim the Stepford soccer Mom and Carl the strenuously heterosexual Dad work in the State Department's Passport Services. Today, Kim and Carl and Foggy Bottom thought it would be a real corker of an idea to hold a 40 minute-long travel QA on Facebook. Yes, in this current political and social climate, Kim and Carl whitesplained to America about the best ways to travel the country with your children such as where to get the best tattoos on your forearms and which camps have the lowest impact hard labor regimens. Unfortunately, things didn't go so well for Kim and Carl because they got barraged by a bunch of questions from trolls with sweaty, uncomfortable questions. To their credit, Kim and Carl didn't once mention the fact we've been kidnapping children and putting them in concentration camps, which was just as well when they showed us their lily white childrens' passports and how privileged they were to never have to worry about being arrested for doing nothing and being forced to live under armed guard in abandoned Walmarts 22 hours a day.
I imagine Kim and Carl are doing a lot of heavy drinking right about now and looking over their resumes.
At last. The real reason we're kidnapping adults and children at the
border. Two of these private prison corporations kicked in a cool half
million to Trump's still-missing inauguration fund. So just as a rule of thumb, when you hear Republicans vowing to crack down on MS-13, marijuana or illegal immigrants, follow the fucking money and find out for yourself how much in bribes they've vacuumed up from the private prison industry. Trump's planning on building five new ones with capacities set at 1000 or more. And it's just the beginning, folks.
In a post I put up just yesterday, I wrote about how every government in the world, especially here in the United States, seems to have an inexhaustible capacity for finding cold-blooded fascists ready to do the worst acts imaginable for flag and country. This morning, this audio tape came out that was recorded at a border checkpoint. The nearly eight minute-long tape features lots of small children crying after being abducted from their parents but it also reveals two Border Patrol guards making jokes about the crying children. Heartless pricks.
We now have so many concentration camps detention facilities, we need a website with an interactive map to show us where they all are. Not surprisingly, nearly a quarter of them are in the Great State of Texas, a state mostly comprised of stolen Mexican and Native American land. And finally...

Is it just me or does Stephen Miller's suit cry out for a little extra something, like a swastika armband, for instance?

Monday, June 18, 2018

So Far Today on Republican Twilight Zone:

Jeff Sessions is blaming Democrats for us being "forced" to kidnap
children at the border at a Sheriff's convention in New Orleans.
Despite this, Stephen "Goebbels" Miller says separating children from their parents by force was "a simple decision." So whose decision was it, again?
Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen is saying there's no such policy to
kidnap children at the border. There IS a policy. Trump's. There's just
no law mandating it.
And Rick Santorum escaped his orderlies
again to run on a CNN sound stage to say that maybe these people
shouldn't have come here to begin with.
We still haven't had a commercial break.

Stanford and Milgram redux

I don't know the provenance of this account but I have no suspicion that
it's fake. If you can read this without wanting to cry, if you can
rationalize visiting the nightmare of us taking by force children from
their parents for what amounts to a misdemeanor offense, then you can just stop reading right now. But we are no longer the United States envisioned
by the Founding Fathers. What was once a functioning democratic
republic is now just a husk long since hollowed out by and now stuffed
with criminals, psychopaths, oligarchs and kleptocrats. Trump was
incredibly stupid to do this in an election year. So remember this in
November.
It's one thing to allow kleptocrats into our government. Our standards have sunk so low this past century that, like mouse droppings and rat hairs in our hot dogs, we'll allow a certain percentage of our government to be infested with such people. But money and power is one thing- Now, these kleptocrats are stealing children from families who commit, at most, a misdemeanor offense of approaching the southern border without documentation.
What we're seeing there is a giant, economy-sized version of the Stanford Experiment from 1971. The results of this experiment were so swift and horrifying that it became virtually the only ground-breaking psychology experiment that was never seen to fruition. For those of you who don't know what this was about or had never heard of it, here's a brief rundown:
Funded by good old Uncle Sam, specifically the US Office of Naval Research, it sought to define and document the effects of both perceived power and the lack of it within a controlled environment. The introduction in the Wikipedia article states, "The results of the experiment have never been successfully replicated." This is patently and palpably untrue. We see it replicated in everyday life, especially in the government. But I'm putting the cart before the ox.
Using ordinary college students, the Stanford Experiment randomly divided the subjects into two groups- Prisoners and guards. The "guards" were instructed by psychology professor Philip Zimbardo to use psychological control methods on the "prisoners." Disturbingly reminiscent of the Milgram Experiment a decade earlier, Stanford and Zimbardo took the first tentative steps toward understanding how easily humans could abandon their moral belief system and become absorbed in roles thrust upon them by even fake authoritarian figures. (In fact, Milgram was inspired by the Jerusalem trial of Adolph Eichmann that was taking place at the same time).
Within 36 hours, things began to fall apart in the Stanford Experiment. One "prisoner" had begun to act "crazy", in the appallingly imprecise language of Dr. Zimbardo and eventually had to be released. The prisoners began to rebel, turn on the others for not accepting the harsh and even cruel psychological measures exerted, under Zimbardo's direction, by the "guards." One such "guard" had been labelled as having "genuine sadistic tendencies".
As the days wore on, the "guards" had resorted to measures such as rewarding compliant prisoners with better food and giving inferior food to non-compliant ones, forcing them to urinate and defecate in buckets, taking away mattresses, attacking rioting "prisoners" with fire extinguishers and solitary confinement. The unethical experiment was eventually terminated when Zimbardo's girlfriend and future wife Christina Maslach informed him of the unethical nature of his experiment and his own absorption in his role as "warden."
Shockingly, and tellingly, out of more than 50 people who'd audited the experiment, Maslach was the only one who'd objected to the experiment's morality.
The point I'm making here is that every government in the world has psychopaths and sociopaths who are thrust into real situations in which they are forced to do the unimaginable to their fellow humans. And some don't have to be forced. The United States is certainly no exception as Abu Ghraib, Iraq and many other instances have shown us. And we're seeing this cold-hearted compliance and even zeal that was typical of Eichmann and the Nazis in our kidnapping of children at the border.
What stuck out the most for me in those screengrabs that were put on Facebook was when one of the flight attendants, seeing tears streaming down a terrified six year-old girl's face, then returned her hug in a futile but heartfelt gesture of hope, "much to the scowl and comments from the adult escort."
In this fascist bubble populated by very real guards with genuine sadistic tendencies in an ultimately uncontrolled environment, noncompliance even by those not assigned within that bubble are growled at and warned off by the real-life guards. That's what stuck out for me most of all. That these men who could have just as easily have been part of Eichmann's staff are now taking children from their parents while others escort them hundreds of miles from their parents and belligerently protest any semblance of compassion shown to their frightened charges.
These are the new Nazis, the kind excused time and again by the man who leads them, Germanic strongman Donald John Trump. They would easily have become the many people in Milgram who would have administered allegedly fatal electric shocks to helpless subjects under the guise of "just following orders."
Such people have no soul and no conscience, which makes them perfect for these jobs. There is nothing than can be done about them. The pilots who would bomb civilian villages or the men who would shoot women, children and babies in My Lai, the men who would herd the Jews into the "showers" and the ones who would drop the Zyklon B are all cut from the same rotten piece of wholecloth. These authoritarian personalities identify so strongly with their roles of conferred power that they forget what identity they once had, if they ever did, and will do absolutely anything and everything to indefinitely retain that power.
They will always be among us, these quasi-pod people that look and act human outside of their workplace and are exactly the wrong type of people who should have any contact with children.
We will always be afflicted with dead-eyed psychopaths in our government from Steven Miller all the way down the 15 year Border Patrol agent who senselessly murdered Claudia Gonzalez in Texas just for approaching him.
The problem is the bar for moral and immoral behavior, what is acceptable and what is intolerable can be set very low very quickly as Stanford proved. And the sooner we get in front of this kidnapping scheme of Trump's, the sooner we can reacquaint ourselves with our true north.

Sunday, June 17, 2018

A Modest Proposal

(By Cyril Blubberpuss, Conservative-American)

To: pnovakovic@generaldynamics.com
From cblubberpuss@onepercent.com

Dear Ms. Phebe Novakovic:

As a fellow One percenter and self-professed Trump Deplorable Zero, I am writing to you with a modest proposal (Not to be confused with an essay by another writer, some Jonathan Swiftboat or another, you know, the erotic author who wrote about bondage and talking horses).
It has come to my attention that General Dynamics (whom my kid brother Cecil used to think was a DC super villain but more on him later) has received a massive contract through ICE and ORR. Understandably, you've been close mouthed about this contract, rightly giving the liberal twats at the Daily Beast the usual corporate runaround by sending them to the equally close mouthed Department of Health and Human Services.
No doubt, kidnapping children from their helpless parents is an absolute necessity for national security and it is only by the happiest of coincidences that defense contractors such as your General Dynamics and the once disgraced MVM (which has benefited greatly from Uncle Sam's forgiving nature by being awarded $43,000,000 in contracts after being fired by the CIA) had gotten tens of millions of dollars in much-needed business since last September, several months before the Democrat Party in Congress thought of the idea of separating children from their parents at the borders.
However, as much money as you're obviously making off of migrant separation, the Last Great American Frontier, I'm kept awake every night, haunted by the fear that you folks at General Dynamics (as well as Blackwater, Halliburton or any other trusted corporation with whom our government has dealt in good faith over the years, should they get in on the ground floor) may not be maximizing your money-making potential in this business arena. And these contracts come at a fortuitous time, since at the end of the trading day last Friday (I'm a titan in the financial sector), General Dynamics' shares lost 0.5% of their value and fell to $194.81 a share.
You can do better than that. Allow me to elucidate by starting with a story about my kid brother Cecil:

My father Ambrose (a good friend of Fred Trump and, later, Donald) and I were always worried about little Cecil. Like many children who came of privilege and wealth, for the first 30 or so years of his life, Cecil was an indolent sort. Rather than learning the finer points of tax evasion, union-busting and being the corporate titan our father was (and that I, too, would one day become), Cecil was always more interested in going to the local junior high schools' wrestling meets (from which he was eventually barred on account of a series of misunderstandings involving locker rooms). We tried buying him suits from Brooks Brothers so he'd look the part but he would just take them to seamstresses and have them put on lace ruffles and flounces so he looked like a balding, glandularly-challenged tranny hooker from the French Quarter.
So it was with unmitigated joy when we discovered just before my father's death that in 1990, Cecil founded Cecilsprays.com, the first live sex chat website in internet history. At last, he was a businessman and entrepreneur in his own right and making his own money! Cecil's business model was stunningly low overhead. Using our family's contacts in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, Cecil instructed his contacts to go to student hostels all over the Soviet Bloc and use (sometimes strenuous) persuasion to talk these young male studs to do their bit for whatever flag and country they hailed from and to do live sex shows for $15 per 15 minute private session.
Then one boy had the gall to saw off his foot using an old discarded jagged band saw that was sitting around the abandoned factory and hop his way to the Yugoslavian authorities. Eventually, our "comrades" in Eastern Europe contacted the FBI and ICE and burst into Cecil's SoHo loft while he was in mid ejaculation to take him into custody. For some reason, the poor boy was so racked with remorse, he even volunteered to go to Riker's Island even after hearing abominable stories about the nightly prison shower rapes that go on there.
Anyway, despite my lingering resentment at ICE for arresting my baby brother for rescuing misguided European youths bound for law and medical school who came from Third World countries where the sound of dying, screaming rabbits are blared on PA systems every morning, this is one time those jackals can work for us, and you and your worthy corporation, for a change.
Did you ever see a movie called Schindler's List? (I have the DVD BluRay edition in which one of the extra features is a deleted scene in which Liam Neeson porks a Jewish girl in front of a bunch of Nazi officers. They eventually went with just the kiss.). Anyway, Schindler was, like you, an industrialist in a Nazi country and when the Germans asked him why he was saving Jewish children, he held up a little girl's hand and asked, "How else can I shine the inside of a casing of a 40 mm mortar round?"
There you go. Put the little taco-munching moochers to work in exchange for the education on US history, food and dog kennel cages we're giving them courtesy of those who actually do pay taxes. And I have some additional suggestions:
I'd imagine Research and Development's biggest headache in the defense industry is not testing its missiles and mortar rounds on live targets. How else are we supposed to gauge the accuracy of missiles that cost millions if we're trying to surgically bomb a Muslim wedding, with all sorts of towel heads screaming and running all over the place?
Well, you have the solution to that particular problem literally at your grasping fingertips. As ICE raids all over the nation have proven time and again, these little brown-skinned kids are quicker and more nimble than ferrets on speed and those poor fellows at ICE must feel at times as if they're trying to herd feral cats. Place them in an Aberdeen Proving Grounds-like environment in which they have some room to move around then let 'er rip. Such canned hunting pens are all the rage with those dozens of 2nd Amendment types who still listen to Ted Nugent but are too fat and lazy to actually hunt animals in their native habitat.
Why, the possibilities for these children to make you and your company immense amounts of money, more than you're already making in your diversification from national defense to child care, boggles even the minds of those of us who deal with huge sums daily. I have many more ideas and I await your rejoinder with bated breath so I can discuss them with you.
Sincerely,